On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Geoffrey Sneddon <[email protected]> wrote: > > Removing Andrew seeming his email bounces… > > On 26 Mar 2009, at 05:48, John Panzer wrote: > >> Note: Blogger exports and imports blogs in an extended Atom format; we'd >> be interested in standardizing (the main extension is keeping comments with >> entries, and efforts have been made to re-use existing standards). Let me >> know if you want details. > > Right, I had a look at what you guys did. My main issue was making certain > values of atom:category significant, which seems a rather dirty hack (for a > start, if you try and interpret it as a normal Atom feed document, you get > something you don't want). Furthermore, it means that if an object has to be > created for a Post/Comment, it couldn't be done (nor processing really > beginning) until the atom:entry end tag had been seen, which makes > processing a lot more complex using a streaming parser (which, as export > files can easily become large, is needed).
Just wanted to mention that some folks (myself included) regard using atom:category the way blogger does (to say this is a "comment" kind of thing, or a "post" kind of thing) to be both perfectly appropriate and actually elegant (not a "dirty hack"). The fact that they don't use @label makes it trivial to have the category not display in environments where it shouldn't. I regard this sort of use of atom:category one of the very best implementation practices for gently & reasonably extending Atom. Much of Atom's power comes from this sort of thing. I realize that not everyone agrees :-). --peter keane > > The two nicer solutions I can think of are to either place atom:entry within > a child element of atom:feed if it is a comment (but this falls into > integration issue with things like atom:entry's atom:author coming from > atom:feed or not, etc.), or to add an attribute to atom:entry (but this > again has issues when the processor isn't aware of the export format, but > has the possibility of being backwards compatible with Blogger). > > Needless to say, all of these solutions have downsides, which is why I went > with the ustar-based solution (which has it's downsides too, such as greater > implementation complexity, but it has the advantage of being able to store > other files apart from what can be easily put within the Atom feed). > > -- > Geoffrey Sneddon > <http://gsnedders.com/> > >
